do you wish that unit vs unit battle damage was realistic?

[Kryten]

Originally posted by Quandary
Referencing the Finnish campaign, or a similar, in essence, type of trap used by the Soviets, is reality when talking about those two nations' efforts against the invading German tanks.

Referencing those two nations' campaigns as a way of explaining how a Civ 3 tank got destroyed by a Civ 3 spearman (or similar) is fantasy when talking about Civ 3, even though the fantasy is based on something that actually happened in the real world.

No matter how creative one might wish to be, Civ 3 does not in any way provide any type of background or support for a battle being influenced by waiting for tank operators to get out of the vehicle for toileting, whoring, or a good rousing sing-along around their virtual campfire.

And I totally agree with you (there, I bet that supprised you. )

Civ3 is a SIMULATION, and it uses abstract mechanisms to SIMULATE real world events, such as combat and the few rare times when the "unexpected happens"....like the little battalion beating the bigger better battalion.

If we ignore the unit names and visuals for a moment, then all we are talking about is one unit with an offensive value of 16 or 24 attacking another unit with a defensive value of 2.
If we assume that the weaker unit is fortified across a river, up a hill, in a Metropolis, then it's defence has gone up from 2 to 6.
Using CivLackey's excellent "Combat Calculator" (which can be found HERE), then we find the following:-
16 v. 6 = 91% chance of victory, 9% chance of defeat.
24 v. 6 = 97% chance of victory, 3% chance of defeat.
But the attacking unit is still NOT destroyed, because it can move faster, so most of the time all it does is retreat!
(Assuming that the player was clever enough to save some move points of course)

As for why the attack failed....ah, that's up to the player's imagination, and that is where the "fantasy" comes in.
(Some people accept that bad things do happen, and things can sometimes go wrong.....others don't like it)

I think that where we differ is this....

Originally posted by Quandary
In this context, I say "fantasy" to cover any explanation created by the player to explain how something which otherwise should not have happened, did happen.

You (and others) are saying that "it should not have happened".
I (and others) are saying that "in warfare, the unexpected CAN sometimes happen".

This is the only difference between us.

 

[Charlie Martel]

If you hate how unrealistic the combat is in this game you could always edit it. I seem to have trouble getting 360/240 MA to lose to a 1/2 Spearman (whatever the case)

 

[Padma]

If I didn't already agree with Kryten, this thread would have probably clinched it for me.

I don't need/want more realism. Civ3 is not a "wargame" in the classical sense. It is a civilization building game. War is a part of civilization, but it is abstracted, just like Trade, and Diplomacy. The fact that on demonstrably rare occasions a relatively weak unit can defeat relatively strong ones, even a string of them, just corresponds to the reality that on rare occasions, such things have happened in the real world.

 

[Quandary]

Kryten:

You (and others) are saying that "it should not have happened".

Essentially.

I'm more of a mind that yes, it shouldn't have happened, but it did anyway, so accept it and move on or find another game.

A dozen years of playing online fantasy games (MMORPGs) from Shadow of Yserbius to Dark Age of Camelot can do a lot for, and against, a gamers tolerance for assorted silly stuff.

Nor do I have any problem with making up stories to explain or justify things that happen or need to be done.

In fact, it bothers the devil out of me when I need to go to war with another civ in order to win the game, or get a better score, and I don't have a good reason to justify that war.

Then again I could name my leader "Bush lite" so I wouldn't need a reason... (whoops, political commentary there, sorry about that )

Padma:

Civ3 is not a "wargame" in the classical sense.

For me, Civ 3 is far too war oriented as it is. I'd prefer it if I could stay at peace and build away, knowing that I don't have to have the first or second largest land mass in order to beat the AI on the historgraph.

A combination of Civilization and Sim City would best suit my own tastes. Get some earthquakes and floods into the game, and tone down AI declarations of war by about ten thousand percent and I'd be the proverbial pig in slop.

 

[alpha wolf 64]

people claim that civ3 isnt a war game. but the whole design of the game is for the AIs to get more and more annoyed with the human until they sneak attack you. i've never been close to having a peaceful game, not even when i'm isolated on a small island by myself. perfect example was my last game. I found myself alone on a good sized island. I quickly populated the coastline but a few celt cities sprung up on the far end. even tho i traded lots of techs/maps/resources to them, they still declared war on me from the polite attitude. i formed a few alliances with other polite civs. i then invaded the celt homeland and conquered them. i didnt raze any cities, nor kill any settlers. upon capturing the last celt city, i found that i was now at war with my best ally, and all my other allies had gone from gracious to furious. I reloaded that game to let an ally take the last celt city and it had absolutely no difference. from that point on, it was continous warfare as the AIs went MPP crazy. Many of the MPP were made and invoked between my turns. did this change with PTW? MPPs are actived even tho I never attacked neither of them.

 

[Kryten]

Originally posted by Quandary
In fact, it bothers the devil out of me when I need to go to war with another civ in order to win the game, or get a better score, and I don't have a good reason to justify that war.

Then again I could name my leader "Bush lite" so I wouldn't need a reason... (whoops, political commentary there, sorry about that )

Now that is something that we could agree on!

By the way, you mentioned in an earlier post that although you liked many of the "realism" suggestions in Mojotronica's thread, there were some that you didn't care for.
I wonder if you would like to post something in that thread about the ones you don't like?
I'm sure that others would be interested in your observations....I know I would.

To alpha wolf 64,

William Pitt, a British statesman of the 1800's, once summed up the whole of diplomacy in a single sentence....

"We have no permanent enemies, and no permanent allies....."

 

[hbdragon88]

The only thing that bothers me is that it can really spin out of control, sometimes. A five-unit modern armor army, veterans, equipped with a 2hp-bonus each, knocked down a mechanized infantry to 2hp and met its destruction with a surprising resilance! It got me irate. This was in a size 2 city too.

The first battle engaging in a city seems relatively easy, and the next battle is much tougher. I killed a mechanized infantry in a size 23 city without trouble once, but the second defender caused a lot more problems before it got destroyed

 

[Ayatollah So]

A rifleman should have a chance to beat a tank, yes -- but Civ2 gave us that. It should be a small chance. More generally, there should be dramatic rewards for technological superiority.

There was an interesting thread a while back on the subject "do you upgrade pikemen?" A large percentage said no, or at least, not to musketeers. Many said that they avoid hooking up saltpeter in order to continue building pikemen (defense 3, cost 30) instead of musketeers (defense 4, cost 60). This is the kind of lunacy that Firaxis A/D/M and shield cost values drive us to.

The obvious solution is to mod the values. The problem with that is that it's nice to compare notes on CivFanatics, and it makes comparisons more meaningful if you're playing the same game. So, let me plead - I mean ask - does anyone know of any mod that's reasonably popular and fixes at least the most outrageous of the Firaxis unit value bungles?

 

[Quandary]

Ayatollah: I don't think it can be fully "fixed". You can change the attack/defend values, and add HP bonuses, but in the end it comes down to a very random random number generator calculating the outcome of each battle (well, mostly totally random... about 90% of the time I see the unit losing the first HP being the one losing the battle).

I'd guess that the closest one could come would be to really rev up the high end units' numbers, add those HP bonuses, and then reduce or just eliminate terrain and city size bonuses.

Again, even after doing all of that, you can still expect that a French musketeer will still sometimes take out a German panzer.

Plus, as hbdragon88 mentioned above, it's not uncommon for defenders to get into an amazing groove of luck. Look at this thread about worst battles to see some extreme examples of that.

 

[Charlie Martel]

Originally posted by Quandary
I don't think it can be fully "fixed". You can change the attack/defend values, and add HP bonuses, but in the end it comes down to a very random random number generator calculating the outcome of each battle (well, mostly totally random... about 90% of the time I see the unit losing the first HP being the one losing the battle).

Ummm yes it can be fixed. Try giving a unit 1000 attack and have it attack a unit with 1 defense, every single time the 1000 attack unit will win even after losing a hitpoint first. If you give it extra hitpoints that actually makes it worse. If you leave the hitpoints at the default 2-5, and just exponentially increase attack/defense, it really does cut down on the unrealistic combat. One time I was able to take out a whole middle ages empire with just 5 modern armor (without losing one, this was diety).

 

[Kryten]

Originally posted by Quandary
Again, even after doing all of that, you can still expect that a French musketeer will still sometimes take out a German panzer.

....er....this is not strictly true, is it.

Originally posted by Quandary
....wherefore we once more get back to fantasy role playing scenarios.

I mean....as Quandary quite rightly pointed out to me....these are not REALLY French Musketeers defending against German Panzers are they. Thinking that they are is just "fantasy role-playing".
We humans see Musket & Tank figures, and they are called by that name, but in fact all they really are is just two abstract units, one with an attack of 16 while the other has a defence of 4.
The computer has no idea what a Musketman really is....they are just numbers

And Quandary is quite right: as Charlie Martel also pointed out earlier, you could multiply the attack and defence of each 'unit' in the Middle Ages by 2, those in the Industrial times by 4, and so on.
This won't fully eliminate the chance of a unit with a defence of 8 defeating a unit of 64 (WHATEVER they look like or are called), but it would reduce the chances down to less than 1% of this ever happening.
(Oh, and you would also need to multiply the bombard factors by the same amount as well)

I'm afraid that I don't know off-hand of any specific mods that already have been modified in this way, but it is very simple to do.

LATER EDIT: Oops! Sorry Charlie Martel....you posted just as I did.
(I've only got two typing fingers and one brain cell I'm afraid! )

 

[Quandary]

Charlie Martel:

Ummm yes it can be fixed. Try giving a unit 1000 attack and have it attack a unit with 1 defense...

Okay, okay. I wasn't thinking of modifying to quite that great an extreme.

Kryten:

We humans see Musket & Tank figures, and they are called by that name, but in fact all they really are is just two abstract units, one with an attack of 16 while the other has a defence of 4.
The computer has no idea what a Musketman really is....they are just numbers

I know you're poking fun at me, in a good natured way of course, but you've actually hit upon the exact flaw in the combat system (for those of us who think it's flawed, that is).

Good job!

You see, in a fantasy game, your character will have an attack rating, a defense rating, and an armor factor rating. Different fantasy games calculate this mess of nunbers differently, but all of them take both the defense rating and the armor class rating into account before determining if your avatar got hit by his attacker, or how hard he got hit.

Civ doesn't have that extra armor class rating, which is why we'd have to go to the extreme posed by Charlie in order to get the desired outcome.

So where a fantasy game would have those rifleman bullets pinging off the tank or MA's armor, Civ scores a hit and pulls a HP off, thereby allowing the results that we're all familure with.

Another for you, my man

 

[Kryten]

Touché

 

[El Tee]

I don't have so many problems with the combat system in the grand scheme of the game. As mentioned before, it's a *simulation* game, not an accurate tactical game.

That said, I haven't had a Modern Armor be defeated by a Spearman. However, I could see the *possibility* of a Modern Armor/Mech Infantry defeated by a Rifleman/Guerilla in an urban setting - if you're familiar with urban warfare or the "swarm" tactic of infantry vs. mechanized vehicles in small spaces, you can see how a tank unit made for open terrain, punching through armored defenses might be a bit out of its element in a city when it doesn't have an infantry screen of its own...but I'm getting a little off-topic here.

Could the game be made more realistic in terms of resolution of military conflict? Certainly. But that would involve changing a major part of the game - if you made each battle more user-controllable (perhaps a different "sub-game" opens, where you command the troops in tactical combat) Civilization 3 would take much longer to play.

All in all, the way I play the game, with the strategy I use, I like the game just fine.

 

[Quandary]

El Tee: I don't think you're getting off-topic at all.

The largest part of the problem is that Civ 3 makes tank units and MA units seem to be nothing but tanks or MA. I don't know what this is supposed to simulate, but as others have mentioned, it would be a very rare invading army that was made up of nothing but armored units.

Adding to that perception problem is the upgrade & remove from production list system used in the game. What I mean is that human type units are replaced with, not augmented by, the armored units.

I haven't seen the PTW "modern infantry" (could someone tell me what the stats are?), but that sounds like it could be a unit to augment the armored units... paratroopers and marines sure don't in vanilla Civ.

A unit system where armored gets penalties for attacking on mountains (or can't roll up them at all) or in cities would work if there was a comparable foot unit to use in those situations. However you have to have a foot unit with comparable stats or going against large city based MI would be flat out suicide.

Another alternative would be to not allow tanks/MA to attack cities, or go onto mountains, at all, and also not allow MI to be inside cities or on top of mountains.

If the warfare then became foot units verses foot units, people would still complain that the "super foot unit of the future" loses to an ancient unit, but it would at least be believable.